What Twitter's Premium Tweetdeck Could Mean for Recruiters

24 Apr 2017

Advertising, Staff Recruitment, Social, Twitter

What Twitter's Premium Tweetdeck Could Mean for Recruiters

Twitter has dropped hints that it is planning to release a paid subscription version of its Tweetdeck social media dashboard for managing Twitter accounts. But could it compete with established tools and would it have anything unique to offer recruitment?

Last week users began tweeting screenshots of a survey polling opinions and what the premium version of Tweetdeck could look like.

“We’re conducting this survey to assess the interest in a new, more enhanced version of Tweetdeck,” a spokeswoman told The Verge.

“We regularly conduct user research to gather feedback about people’s Twitter experience and to better inform our product investment decisions, and we’re exploring several ways to make Tweetdeck even more valuable for professionals.”

For a monthly fee, Twitter would offer a range of new features.

Advanced analytics

The company’s survey said: “This premium tool set will provide valuable viewing, posting, and signalling tools like alerts, trends and activity analysis, advanced analytics, and composing and posting tools all in one customisable dashboard.

“It will be designed to make it easier than ever to keep up with multiple interests, grow your audience, and see even more great content and information in real-time.”

If it goes ahead with premium Tweetdeck accounts, Twitter would find itself competing with established subscription social media management tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social. However, these dashboards also enable a campaign to be managed across multiple channels and accounts.

If the company pulls it off, it would represent a much-needed new revenue stream for the troubled company, which in February saw a massive crash in share price when revenue and user base growth both failed to meet expectations.

Recruitment applications

But what could it mean for recruitment? Not much, according to Felix Wetzel, former group marketing director at Jobsite and current managing director of Zyx Associates, commenting for Recruiter. He said recruiters need to manage multiple channels and Twitter isn’t an important-enough channel for recruitment, both from a candidate sourcing and a recruiter-to-recruiter channel, for people to pay just for a single platform service.

But one proposed feature - analysis tools that understand topics of conversation - caught the eye of Katharine Robinson, consultant and owner of search training firm for recruiters Sourcing Hat.

“Say you were looking at a particular event – could you look at the distribution of location around the people attending? What companies they work for? How much information could you delve into and find out about a community and conversation? That’s quite compelling.

“It’s taking Twitter up a notch. Twitter is already a hyper networking tool that makes everybody available to you. It’s giving you a bit more on top of that existing capability.”

Single channel

It would take a lot for cash-strapped recruiters to switch from established dashboards invest in an unknown tool that only manages one channel when most campaigns span several. But if some of these original features live up to the hype,

The Digital team’s advice – get a free trial if you can but don’t subscribe unless Twitter is your main channel or the new analysis features would prove a game-changer for your campaigns. If we get our hands on it we’ll keep you posted.